A P Ritchey

by A.P. Ritchey

No one had stepped forward.

Not a single person.

That was no surprise to anyone who’d stood before the machine. Three large, cold rings suspended in a white room surrounded by glass walls and ranks of computers. No ornament. No promise. It looked like a guillotine for molecules. The first human-rated transporter. Billions of dollars and the damn thing actually worked.

At least on the little stuff. 

They had pushed rocks through it. Keys, books, clocks. Then the mice, of course. Poor trembling things that vanished in a hiss of light and reappeared in an identical room, hundreds of miles up the coast, with hearts hammering and eyes rolling in their pink skulls. Sometimes wrong. Sometimes changed in ways the men in the white coats would not speak of. 

Sometimes the thing that went in simply did not come back at all. 

Lost, they said. 

Lost in the stream.

But they’d adjusted their calculations and the settings for the capacitors and practiced at the procedure countless times, and all agreed the time had arrived for a human trial. Someone would be first. Someone who would put their feet upon the metal dais and walk into the trembling light like a sinner to judgment. Someone brave, or foolish, or most likely a bit of both. They would be the first to have their very being parsed into particles, accelerated through the wormhole’s throat, and reassembled eight hundred miles north up in Seattle. 

The first human to travel faster than light. 

And possibly the first to die of it.

The conglomerate pretended at courage, but their own engineers refused the leap. Not one scientist, not one employee. They quoted schedules and liabilities, but the truth clung to them like smoke. They were afraid. So, the suits offered two million dollars. A price on mortality. A bounty for stepping into the unknown.

#

On the morning of the test, the rings burned with pale power and the veil hung between them—an undulant curtain of cold light, flickering and trembling.

Jason Kerr stood before it.

Before that day he had been no one. A low-level scientist working in an adjacent complex. His field was biopharma, not particle physics. But he was educated in the sciences and that was a big part of the search for a volunteer — someone who could actually understand exactly what they were being asked to do.

Not everyone agreed, but some considered the device to be a form of suicide. As it turned out, when the award was announced, plenty of people would gladly die for the money, so simply volunteering wasn’t enough. The finalist had to be able to explain the process, as unsettling as it was, and still convince the committee they were doing it for the benefit of science or humanity or something parallel and convincing. Jason Kerr had told the board in a calm, level voice that he understood the risk. He had even spoken the forbidden phrase aloud. Personal continuity.

Where others had been unnerved, Jason Kerr wasn’t, not that he wasn’t scared out of his mind.

#

Hours of checks.

Redundant checks.

Go/no-go.

Humanity has never been so afraid of the word go. But the time finally arrived.

Jason stepped forward.

“Last chance,” Dr. Eames said, clutching a clipboard to her breast like a holy text.

“Last chance?” Jason asked. His eyes were fixed on the writhing veil.

“To not do this.”

He gave a slow nod. “It’s just walking, right? Just close my eyes and go straight in.” He looked at her. “And it will still be me that comes out the other side. Right?”

Her jaw worked. She seemed to be swallowing something sharp. 

“That’s a very deep, very philosophical question.” Eames let out a breath. “Even now, you don’t have to do this.”

Jason rolled his shoulders and breathed as if preparing to run into a storm. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”

“For what it’s worth, I prefer to think it will be you that returns.” She laid her hand on his shoulder. Gave it a squeeze. “No matter what, people will remember your name.”

She stepped off the dais and Jason stared into the machine.

The coils spat light.

The floor hummed.

Banks of sensors recorded a thousand variables every thousandth of a second. Up in Washington, a crowd pressed against thick, sound-dampening glass walls, watching their own rings, their own writhing lightscape, waiting for the impossible.

Cameras stood ready.

The champagne was cold.

Jason Kerr did not think of any of this.

He thought of his atoms, for in truth, he knew himself for what he was: a document, a chapter of a book pressed from the pulp of the tree of life. And he had willingly agreed to step into that machine, that bright monstrosity of steel and calculus. Part fax machine. Part paper shredder. A device that would read every line of him even as it tore him apart and nothing of him remained but a ledger of charge and position. He understood the stream would carry him behind the great curtain of the universe, and that he would rise again. A resurrection. Or maybe just an echo.

Someone had to take the leap.

Jason faced the veil. It seethed in its rings like light made flesh. The cold of it crawled across his skin. Every animal instinct in him clung to the floor.

He set his jaw.

Fisted his hands.

Stepped forward. 

As if sensing a meal, the veil quivered at his approach, like the hide of some great and dreaming beast.

Then, Jason Kerr walked into the light.

#

At first glance, it worked.

The reconstituted matter transversed the eight hundred miles between the machines faster than a photon in open space. It arrived in the shape of a man stepping from within the light. A joyous moment.

The wonder.

The dizzying implications. 

But the world was given precious few days to ponder this great leap.

For already the air itself had begun to ring with a faint and steady tremor, like the low tuning of some buried cello whose strings ran between the devices. Men and women in white lab coats in California and Washington lifted their faces from their screens, and in their eyes lay the first dull apprehension that they had miscalculated.

Something was happening. 

Something different, unexpected. 

Something with that godawful machine. 

Different than the rocks and the keys, different than the clocks and books and the mice. For this tunnel which the scientists had so laboriously dug, this narrow dark bright crease that ran behind the great curtain of the equation that is the universe, did not close that day.

Nor the next.

Nor for all the turning of the ages that followed.

The two veils endured.

The two ends of a trembling membrane drawn taut. In time, with no small amount of desperation, the machines at either end were carefully dismantled.

Then the buildings.

Then everything within a two-mile radius. 

Yet still the apertures burned cold and bright, a wound in the fabric of the world that neither scabbed nor bled.

Generations passed. 

Then centuries. 

Then millennia. 

Scholars and priests who knew nothing of Jason Kerr built shrines around the shimmering lights. Nations rose around it and the number of words used to describe it multiplied as new languages found footing in the dim, distant future. A hundred-thousand generations of children grew up in a world with twin eternal lights, knowing no other reality.

In time, humanity faltered. Language itself vanished.

And still the veils churned.

Continents drifted.

Oceans receded.

Still the apertures seethed, an endless export from some other dimension from behind the great curtain that is the universe.

Only when five billion years passed and the Sun grew swollen and red and monstrous in the sky, when it finally gorged upon the brittle rind of the world, did the link between the two apertures falter and collapse, ripped from beyond the curtain by an unfathomable gravity well, its final shudder extinguished beneath a tide of fire.

Yet even then, in the smallest recesses of those miniscule dimensions known but to the universe itself, the memory of those open doors remained impressed upon the base fields of the cosmos, like the faint afterimage of lightning on the eye.

And whatever stepped through that machine on that first day, whatever wore the shape of a man or was the echo of one, had all that time to walk the darkened halls between the atoms and the stars, unchallenged and unseen.

~

Bio:

AP Ritchey’s speculative fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from 4lph4num3r1c, Club Chicxulub, SciFi Shorts, AntipodeanSF, Zodiac Review, Rat Bag Lit, Blood + Honey, Eye to the Telescope, After/Thought, Nunum and Frightening Tales. He is also a professional graphic designer, published board game inventor, multi-instrumentalist, and an accomplished printmaker (those works can be seen here: https://adamritchey.com).

Philosophy Note:

I have long been curious about the base reality of the universe — those subatomic fields and dimensions operating far below what we can see and study. At some point, I began to think of our three-dimensional universe as a curtain, one which hides the machinery, the secret pathways, the truth. These ideas come into play here.